Naive

From years ago: This was how the conversation started: at dinner, nervous because I am remarkably perceptive even when my crystal ball is on the fritz, I twisted a napkin in my hands and started talking – filling the silence, mostly – about the things I most wanted to do…one of which is to go to the storybook castles in Germany. I wanted to see them, these odes to fairy tales written in marble and glass, the last gift of a mad king to his countrymen. I wanted to stand in the halls of Cinderella's Palace and close my eyes and listen for the sound of a glass slipper on the cobblestones, the scuttling of mice in the wainscoting, the soft weeping of stepsisters who lost their eyes to greed. Who are you? He asked me, in disbelief, in dissatisfaction, his mouth twisted as if I had said something obscene. I opened my mouth and closed it again because I couldn't think of a single thing to say.

I was watching my DVD of Jim Henson's The Storyteller today, and it got me thinking. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, which enjoyed a brief run on HBO in the late 80s, hie thee hence to Amazon.com…the DVD contains nine episodes based on some of the more obscure stories of the Brothers Grimm, lovingly fleshed out by the Creature Shop and the wizards behind Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. I love fairy tales – dragons and little people and the everyday reality of magic, reflecting the mundane back at the reader like a carnival mirror, like truth with a twist. I couldn't explain my fascination to that long ago significant other, couldn't explain why I held on to my battered copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales, couldn't explain the rush of love I felt for that long ago little person (who put gold stars by the stories she loved best) whenever I opened its pages.

The episode I watched today was called Hans my Hedgehog, a sort of precursor story to Beauty and the Beast. In it, a young woman and her woodcutter husband (fairytale husbands are always either woodcutters or millers, and their wives are always barren…it's a hard life to be a minor character in a fairy tale) are desperate for a child. After trying for years to have a baby, the wife blurts out one evening that she doesn't care what her baby looks like, he could look like a little hedgehog, and she would love him anyway. Now, anyone with a passing familiarity with the world of fairie should immediately know that making such rash statements inevitably leads to unintended results. In this case, the wife did have her baby, and just as she wished, he looked like a human-hedgehog hybrid (imagine changing those diapers!). Long story short, the boy was ostracized for his monstrous appearance and eventually ran away into the woods to live among the animals, with only a few chickens and a goat for company (who do not care what one looks like as long as they are fed with passing regularity).

Rule #1: If you suspect you have wandered into a fairy tale by accident, do your level best to not wish for things, at least not in front of open windows or suspicious pieces of garden statuary.

Some years passed, and one day a King got lost in Hans' woods. Kings in fairy tales always have a truly rotten sense of direction. Anyway, Hans finds the King, takes pity on him, and shows him the way out of the woods and back to his castle. The King, who's a good King, luckily enough for our Hans, wants to repay the kindness done him, and asks Hans what he wants. Hans replies (pay attention, gentle reader, this bit is important) that he will take the first thing that greets the king when he arrives home at his castle. The king, thinking the first thing to greet him will be his faithful hound…uhm…Fido, immediately agrees. Giving up Fido seems a small price to pay for being led out of the darkness of Hans' forest – fairy tale forests are not especially nice places at night. Funny things happen there, Kings tend to go missing and reappear as White Stags…fair maidens get lost and end up living scandalously with seven men of suspicious stature…young princesses ensconce themselves in trees to knit shirts for their brothers who are under an enchantment…so you see, our King was quite grateful for being led out of the woods. He rather liked being a King, and rightly assumed he'd like it much better than being a stag or sharing a bachelor pad with a pack of midgets.

Rule #2: Avoid getting lost in the woods unless you are a pedigreed young princess, fair of face and noble of bosom. Stouthearted lads need not apply – too often they'll end up under an enchantment to a wicked witch/ogre/mother-in-law and perhaps turned into some unpleasant woodland creature. Not a bunny though. Can't recall a single case of a prince turned into a bunny. Usually a frog, or a raven. Wicked witches are seldom creative.

Well, the King heads for home, whistling a little "my-bacon's-out-of-the-fire" marching tune as he went, when lo and behold, what is the first thing that comes rushing out to greet him? Not faithful Fido, who'd gotten into a ruckus with the cook's cat and was lying in the garden with an injured paw; no indeed, the first thing that rushed into the King's arms was his beautiful, nubile, conveniently marriageable daughter. (This is another common facet of fairy tales – if someone wants the first thing that greets you when you come home, it's a basic tenet of magic that the thing will end up being your son, your wife or your jailbait female offspring.)

Anyway, the daughter is a saint and obviously on some sort of mood-enhancing drug, as she accepts her fate with the calmness of the chemically cushioned, rather than behaving as a normal teenage girl would and pitching a fit. Can you even imagine that conversation taking place sans valium?

"Oh daddy, I'm so glad you're home!"

"Yes, me too, sugar dumpling…uhm, sweetheart, I have some news. Both good and bad."

"Yes, dearest daddykins?"

"Well, the good news is you won't have to marry Prince Charming after all."

"Oh good, I thought he was a frightful bore…but what's the bad news, oh paterfamilias?"

"…"

"You made a deal with some creature in the woods and I'm going to end up marrying him, aren't I."

"Well…"

"You're an asshole, daddy."

Anyway, Hans shows up to collect his bride, and they get married. It turns out though that our boy Hans is under an enchantment and is able to shed his hedgehog pelt every night to reveal the uber-hunky Prince-body beneath. If his dear wife can stay silent for three days about his nightly wanderings in the nude, she'll get to keep him in his true form forever after.

Rule #3: The Brothers Grimm must've had a pretty dim view of women's ability to keep their bloody mouth shut. Fully half of their stories hinge on the princess keeping a secret, which she's never able to do. So, if you find yourself in a fairy tale, and under an enchantment, and the breaking of this spell will only happen if the beautiful heroine manages to avoid being a big fat blabbermouth…hate to break it to you, but you're pretty well fucked.

So, like all women this Princess is a huge gossip and accidentally lets it slip to her mother that her husband isn't quite what he seems. I thought this whole scene was pretty hilarious, because you can do some serious reading-between-the-lines about previous mother-daughter post-marriage conversations. The mother is clearly quite curious about hedgehog sex, something strongly hinted at in the original story. The Brothers Grimm were a bit pervy, let me tell you. Anyway, Hans disappears in a snit because his wife is a faithless nitwit, forcing the intrepid bride to go after him. On foot. In iron shoes. Nevermind that she's a friggin' Princess and probably could've borrowed Daddy's carriage for the weekend…for some reason nobility in fairy tales is equal to lengthy walks in impossible footwear. Iron shoes…imagine the blisters.

Ultimately because fairy tales believe in happy endings, the Princess finds Hans, and he's so bowled over by her constancy that the enchantment is broken and they run off to live happily ever after. One has to wonder if the Princess is happy with her all-human husband, or if she ever has a hankering for hedgehog lovin'…or maybe that's just me.

I think the thing I love most about fairy tales is there are rules that one follows like a road map to a happy ending. If you're a good person, if you're nice to people (even the ugly ones), if you're kind to animals and share your food with strangers you meet while traveling, you'll be rewarded. Nothing is capricious, nothing is left to chance. If you're in love, that's reason enough for an entire adventure, reason enough to brave a dragon or a giant for their treasure horde, to face down an evil wizard and his host of impossible tasks, to wind your way through a maze of hallucinatory landscapes until you find yourself in the center of the story, back in the arms of your other half...the ending of a fairy tale is always a foregone conclusion. It's how the hero or heroine gets to that ending that's the really entertaining bit.

Rule #4: Nothing is impossible if you believe, and you try, and you're willing to walk a really long way in ridiculously uncomfortable shoes.

Until next time...